How SoundMorph crafted impressive robot sound effects for ‘Robotic Lifeforms 2’:

Robotic Lifeforms from SoundMorph is one of the most impressive robot sound effects libraries out there - and when the team released Robotic Lifeforms 2 five years later, they raised the bar even further. Find out how they did it, in this in-depth interview with Thibault Csukonyi, Boris Karékine and Jason Cushing:

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The demo track for Robotic Lifeforms 2

How long has the library been in the works for?

Thibault Csukonyi (TC): In March 2017, I sent Jason a few experiments I was working on with the Kyma. Mostly random UI sounds. We talked a little and thought it would be cool to work on a library together. A few months passed and early summer we sent him a pdf with all the structures and concepts for a new and quite ambitious (we were even thinking of a plugin, haha!) robotic and creature library. After some back and forth we decided to work on a second opus of the SoundMorph flagship library ‘Robotic Lifeforms’. We started to source new and exciting sounds right away, along with experimenting with various processing techniques. We had roughly 15,000 source sounds and designed toolbox sources by January 2018. That’s the time we started to work around the clock to design everything until March when we delivered everything. Those last 3 months were really intense; we tried to put as much detail as we could into every sound. We were tired at the end but I think it was worth it.

Boris Karékine (BK): The long part was determining categories, finding the right recording locations and making appointments with people – so we wouldn’t interfere too much with their work routines – and obviously cleaning/editing the material we gathered, but we all know that’s a necessary task. The first idea was to make a sound library that would cover every single aspect of a robot. We wanted it to be really modern with as much detail as possible, with ready-to-use sequences but also very simple and isolated parts to leave room for editors and sound designers to create their own sound.

Recording sounds in a printing room

What did you want to get in there that you felt was missing from current robot libraries?

We wanted to break down as much as possible every aspect … so that a sound designer would be able to build his own unique robot, ranging from a small tiny nanobot to a heavyweight 100-foot-tall titan.

TC: I like to call it a modular library so to speak. When we first brainstormed a concept with the rest of the team, we came to the conclusion that some great robot libraries were almost 6 to 7 years old now and that more recent ones were sometimes too abstract, or too « fully designed » for our taste. We wanted to break down as much as possible every aspect and every ingredient needed with the best quality we could achieve so that a sound designer would be able to build his own unique robot, ranging from a small tiny nanobot to a heavyweight 100-foot-tall titan. That’s why we kept mostly the same structure between the Source Folder and the Designed Folder, making it easy to switch back and forth. The challenge was not making some categories overlap each other too much.

Furthermore, we tried to keep a sense of realism in some of the sounds, not overusing granulation engines and crazy random LFOs every time and everywhere since it can become a pitfall for such a library (even if we did it on some, haha). For example, mechanism sounds were the most carefully crafted sequences with various metallic and pneumatics hits, clicks, rattles, and some mixing, color and mastering processing passes to give weight and excitement to the sounds. No servos, bleeps or synths were used in them to enhance the « wow » effect, letting the sound designer have as much freedom as he wants to combine and match various categories of sounds.

Capturing sounds of big pounding machines for Robotic Lifeforms 2

BK: We always kept in mind that someone working in the sound industry should be able to use our samples in their own unique way, whether it be for video games, music, advertising, cinema. I’d say also that good clean sources in 192kHz, gathered in one big library, were too often missing in those types of soundpacks.

TC: Yeah, having an « ultrasonic » setup (shout out to Mattia Cellotto and Michal Fojcik) on this type of sci-fi sound library is not very common yet. I’m not saying using a Sanken CO100K with 192kHz recordings is a thing everyone should do every time they hit record, because it makes little sense in some cases, but for this particular library it opens up a whole new range of sonic experimentation, giving you the possibility, as I just said, to design a wide range of science fiction entities ranging from small to huge with as many details as possible.

What were the hardest sounds to get right?

I ended gathering as many little metallic props as I could, pouring oil on them to make them less resonant and clicky, adding a bit of dirt or flour to tame them even further.

TC: Not the ones I would have imagined before starting to work on this! One thing that was missing, in my opinion, in other similar libraries was those small intricate metallic mechanisms you can hear in films like Iron Man when his suit starts to build up around him. Damn this thing was hard to nail right! The source looks like easy peasy stuff to record at first, gathering some knives and forks and make them rattle against each other a bit and voila, but I quickly realised most of the small metallic props I had just didn’t sound right. Maybe I’m the only one having a hard time nailing this particular type of recording and maybe I overthought it, but I ended gathering as many little metallic props as I could, pouring oil on them to make them less resonant and clicky, adding a bit of dirt or flour to tame them even further, and spending nights experimenting with various handling and interaction between every prop. One cool trick is to use not too big of metal chains rattling on super thick, old and greasy metal blocks or even wood or cardboard surfaces, and not too close to the mic to get rid of nasty resonant clicks.

Recording metal scrap sounds for the library

When I was finally happy with the source I had, I started the design process of those. Hard times again, but it becomes easier when you have the right source right away. The base layer of the Iron Man suit sound is a bed of textures made with those sounds, a delicate mix of slow granulation with sweeping filters and unaltered source recordings, then just add metal knuckle hits and drops along with switch sounds, highly resonant metal impacts and a bit of pneumatics and servos.

BK: Maybe some samples in Attack Defense. It was sometimes hard to focus on weight, space and details without missing the action. We had to find a way to design sophisticated sequences, but very simple to understand. That’s not an easy task with so many tiny things to take into account. But feedback between each one of us helped to clear things up!

Otherwise, it was more about finding the right color for the right sound. We were sometimes using the same plugins and sources and the tones were too similar between samples. Kyma helped a lot with this problem…

Can you tell the story behind some of your favorite sounds in the library?

TC: We used the Kyma a lot in this library. I love the sonic quality of this machine, especially for sci-fi sounds. I received my Paca (Kyma) around February 2017. Obviously the first thing you do is scramble through every premade patch, start experimenting with those, etc… I had some cool little sounds. But then I wanted to step it up a bit and I started reading Jean Edouard Miclot and The Kymaguy (Gustav Scholda) blogs. It was so interesting to realise how deep you can go with this machine.

I started to build small patches in my free time, trying to learn copytalks. I ended up with the first iteration of the « Cyborg Machine ». I posted a video of it and got really excited feedback from guys who I admire like Joseph Fraioli, Chad Mossholder and Tilman Hahn to name a few so I decided to properly finish it. That’s how I ended with the final (well for now!) iteration of the Cyborg Machine V2. We used it a lot to gather designed toolbox sounds for the library. If you have a Kyma, you can download it on our website in our blog section. It is super fun to use!

Also, one cool fact is that many UI sounds in the library were made by Matthieu Debliqui (aka Subjex) basically by uber mangling his own music tracks with spectral plugins that don’t even exist anymore on an old FL Studio build! I love the sounds he got from it.

How did you source sounds for this one?

We ended up doing extensive sessions in a supercar garage in Paris, various metal factories, the RATP Train Factory, junkyards, a printing factory, a big designer wood and metal workshop, all the way up to the Verdon Canyon.

TC: We all started to gather inspiration sounds, footage, articles from games, films, blogs etc… We tried to deconstruct all this into various categories of sounds to record. We then scouted for great locations where we could have a good balance between environmental noise and interesting things to record. We ended up doing extensive sessions in a supercar garage in Paris, various metal factories, the RATP Train Factory, junkyards, a printing factory, a big designer wood and metal workshop, all the way up to the Verdon Canyon where we recorded great metal and stone impacts and footsteps in an unusual place on top of a mountain where the acoustics and silence were just mind-blowing!

At the train factory

BK: Yeah we had a lot of fun during these sessions, and we got great energy from the rest of the team. We rented an entire metal factory for a whole day near Paris with tons of material to play with and nothing and no one to make the recording session difficult with random working noises. I remember a huge trash container where we literally dove in, making dope metal movements, rattles, impacts, drops, steps, articulations, and it sounded big right away because of the special acoustics of this container. We felt very lucky to be able to also spend a whole day at a friend’s supercar garage where we collected great motors, car doors, trunks hits, as well as dope interior car mechanisms.

How have the sounds evolved in this library, compared to the first one?

BK: That’s a question for Jason!

Jason Cushing (JC): I’d say that what the team brought to this release compared to the new one is a lot more Kyma material, a way bigger source library, and some really nice microphones. We recorded the first library mostly with a RØDE NTG3, which is a great mic, but with this one, we had a Stereo Schoeps and a Sanken CO-100K. The clarity from these mics and the ability to pitch high-res sounds was just much more abundant. There are also a lot more plugins, synths and other tools that did not exist when we made the first library…so designing is a bit more in-depth in that sense.

If users want to tweak the sounds further, what are some of the approaches you’d recommend?

BK: You can start from the ground up and have fun pitching the source recs, discovering new sonic textures hidden in the ultra-high part of the spectrum. For me it’s not always a matter of what plugin you use, it’s more about the good sound combo with the right amount of stretching and slight processing, the ability to do more with less. S-Layer from Twisted Tools is a great help to get great combinations if you keep focused on what you want and make a proper selection in the beginning. Otherwise I’d recommend anything in Reaktor that sounds good.

Sound design sessions

TC: Indeed, since the core of our library was to focus on the « modular » approach, start experimenting with various combinations. A few plugins are great for that: S-Layer, like Boris mentioned, and Reaktor in general (try UGH-Grip ensemble, a dope granular sampler when you put an LFO on the sample selecting knob). We used a lot (like a lot) of SoundMorph plugins like Evil Twin, Dust, TimeFlux and Wavewarper. Wavewarper is one of my very favorites. I made a lot of those nanobots « power » and « mechanisms » sounds in it by not considering it as a basic whoosh-only plugin. I took advantage of the fact that samples in it are playing in a loop. I would draw weird and complex pitch, pan, filter and volume curves with sharp variations, automate a parameter with the XY pad and, since all the samples loop in the background with different lengths, you get different variations each time you scroll the X axis on the XY pad.

Sometimes even greater results happen when you find a way to derive the main purpose of the plugin for a completely new approach.

We used a lot the Glitchmachines plugins and Krotos plugins (I’m a big big fan of Reformer to add textures to simple sounds like rising turbines, engines. etc…). Zynaptiq’s plugin Wormhole is great also when you want to add a modern science-fiction twist to a raw recording. Soundtoys, GRM, Tonsturm, etc… All plugins are great ways of experimenting when you know how to take advantage of their main features, and sometimes even greater results happen when you find a way to derive the main purpose of the plugin for a completely new approach.

We used very little distortion plugins on the design section, so even if it is delivered in 96kHz format, you will still be amazed by how far you can pitch some of these without noticing a muffling effect (try some of those energy, power and computers UI sounds!).

A big thanks to Thibault Csukonyi, Boris Karékine, and Jason Cushing for giving us a look at the intricate and exciting robotic sounds of Robotic Lifeforms 2. Explore the full library below:

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